Groupthink in America

Russell Shaw

9/20/17

As a kind of back-to-school gift to students, professors at three
of the nation’s prestige schools offered them a piece of good advice: “Think
for yourself.”

“The danger any student — or faculty member — faces today is
falling into the vice of conformism, yielding to groupthink,” warned these 26
scholars at Princeton, Harvard and Yale. Among the document’s signers were
prominent Catholics Robert P. George of Princeton and Mary Ann Glendon of
Harvard.

The professor’s statement came at the same time as — and could be
read as a complement to — a statement by 180 evangelical leaders, including
heads of seminaries, theologians, pastors and journalists.

The Nashville Statement, so named for the city in which it was
issued, is a forthright and fundamentally pastoral reiteration of traditional
Christian teaching on sex in the context of our increasingly “post-Christian”
culture. Among other things, it rejects same-sex marriage and insists it is
“sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism.”

Predictably, these views and those who hold them have been
pilloried by progressive critics.

A writer in the New York Times,
identified as founder of a group called Faithfully LGBT, no doubt spoke for
many others in decrying the statement as supposedly representing “a renewed
commitment to open bigotry.”

Nashville’s mayor, who one suspects may perhaps not have read the
professors’ warning against groupthink, hastened to tell the world that,
despite the Nashville Statement’s name, it didn’t represent her city’s
right-thinking views on the subject of sex.

This uproar is disturbingly typical of what is likely to happen
these days whenever serious Christians speak up on behalf of Christian ideas
about sexual morality in the face of contemporary groupthink. Now, it seems,
the Supreme Court itself will be weighing these issues during its new term that
begins Oct. 2.

The case — Masterpiece Cakeshop v.
Colorado Civil Rights Commission — involves a Lakewood, Colo., baker
named Jack Phillips whose religious beliefs moved him to refuse to bake a cake
celebrating the marriage of two men. Phillips was hauled before the state civil
rights commission, which found him guilty of sexual orientation discrimination.
State courts ruled against him, and now he has taken his case to the Supreme
Court (where it may be joined by another, similar case involving a florist in
Washington state).

The baker’s lawyers make a novel argument. Phillips, they say, is
a “cake artist” for whom baking cakes is a form of expression. Compelling him
to create a cake for a gay marriage would mean in effect forcing him to say
something he doesn’t believe — a form of “compulsion of speech” ruled out by
other Supreme Court rulings.

Phillips’ argument may be novel, but his situation isn’t. Since
the Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling discovered a constitutional right to same-sex
marriage two years ago, others have been forced to lend their support over
their conscientious objections. It will be a surprise if the Supreme Court
doesn’t join the lower courts in pummeling the baker for resisting this
imposition of groupthink.

Things like this don’t happen by accident. They reflect careful
planning and generous funding by people pushing a new morality and the
groupthink to go with it.

In their statement urging students to think for themselves, the
26 professors warn of a “tyranny of public opinion,” which seeks to create the
impression that the views currently “dominant” on many campuses are “so
obviously correct that only a bigot or a crank could question them.”

To which I would only add: Not just students, and not just on
campuses.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and author of American Church: The
Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America.